"MY AMERICAN UNCLE"
Hope and disapointment are two completely opposing states, but at the same time they are intimitely related, one preceding the other, passing from happiness to disappoinment, to the unexpected.
Who hasn't been hopeful thinking, or dreaming, they had an unknown, rich uncle in America? That distant relative, who one day emigrated following the american dream, who doesn't have other family besides you to which he... can leave his fortune, of whom you knew nothing before, whose existence was hidden from you by your parents and uncles and suddenly the news arrives one day that you are the sole heir to his estate.
One can also take the contrary case that your American uncle is living on the street, sick, etc. And you are his only remaining relative, then what happens?
This project is intended to illustrate the difficulty of maintaining hope—the dreams for a better and uncertain future, where everything will be there to be discovered.
Center of Contemporary Culture CCCE L'Escorxador, April 28, 2011.
ANTONIO ORTUÑO
Press release
Dreams run high in New York. They are the primary fuel that brings new people here every day. Their power and energy are comparable only to the sharp edge of a New York disappointment. Its taste is sour and bites deep into the soul. The Spanish artist Antonio Ortuño knows quite well that the marriage between dreams and disappointments is unbreakable in a city that asks its citizens to endure that battle in order to survive.
That's why Ortuño´s new exhibition 'My American Uncle' is a quest into the emotions and feelings that New Yorkers?and by extension, every citizen of the XXI century have to go through.. Joy, fears, failures but also irony find their way through two different and almost opposite video installations that at the same time complete each other.
One of the spaces is inhabited by a video of a man dreaming in his bed, literally. Apparently he is just a man asleep by himself but, are the fantasies of someone at rest very different from a daydreaming man whose ambitions and hopes push him towards tasks that seem as impossible as the one our unconscious mind takes us every night?
The second video, in a separate area, is less dramatic, more joyful, with a dreamlike quality and a subtle feeling. When Ortuño was a child in Spain, every Spanish family had a dream: ?the return of the American Uncle?, that old family member that left Spain many years before and whose sudden return would mean a life of wealth for everybody. Ortuño found a beautiful character in a hidden café of the Lower East Side and used him as the personification of the American Uncle. His image is mixed with the image of the artist in an odd but compelling visual journey that serves as the perfect contrast with the video of the sleeping man.
A gigantic and quite funny portrait welcomes the visitor into a show in which a series of picture-drawings completes Ortuño's proposal. My American Uncle is quite an interesting show to welcome in the new art season.
Antonio Ortuño (Alicante, 1970) has lived in New York for five years. His career started out in 2002 at the Festival de Arte Contemporáneo "Conmutaciones-02" of Zaragoza, where he showed the video installation "Por Amor/Deshechos", that was also shown at the gallery Local Project in New York in 2006. His video installations were shown at the II Biennale de Valencia, at the "Nabi Center" de Seúl (South Korea) and at the Festival Internacional de VideoArte de Valencia. Recently he also participated at the "The Most Curatorial Biennial of the Universe", "Framing AIDS" in the Queens Museum of Art in New York, and at "Pool Art Fair" in New York City.
Barbara Celis
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